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Thursday, July 16, 2015

#TBT - Times Flies and All That

Yesterday I stopped at the local health food store, but it had moved. It was only on the other side of the building it had been in, so I found it just fine. I walked in and there was the clear-skinned, gray-haired health food lady who is usually there. (Age indeterminate; skin fabulous. Lots of kale, presumably.) I greeted her and commented that I hadn’t been in the new location. “You must’ve just moved,” I said.

“Actually, we’ve been in this location for a year.” She gave me the littlest of quizzical looks. A quizicallette look.

A year? Jeezus. I know that times flies like an arrow and fruit flies like a banana and here today gone tomorrow and all that jazz, but that is ridiculous. At that rate, my life will be over tomorrow.

A year. It seems like just the other month I went in that store looking for eggs but they were out of them. Well, it was another month, twelve months or so ago.

Twelve months ago, where were you? Apparently, I was here. What was I doing? Well, here’s little window into my life exactly a year ago.

The Lingerie of Success (July 16, 2014)

I’m having such a block about writing a blog post, Readers. I don’t know why. That’s not entirely true. I do know why, in part. Because of me. Me and my tendency to lock myself up in internal conflict. Which is why I began this success blog – to unlock myself. That I’m still prone to locked internal conflict these many months – okay, let’s be honest, years – later, is discouraging. To put it mildly.

I’ve just come home from our local coffee house, the one with dozens of Dave Matthews Band posters framed along the walls, the one with the sunny back room and the darker, cooler front room, and the patio, with the music and the wifi and the mellow vibe. I had coffee there with a new acquaintance, let's call her Kay. Kay graduated a few years ahead of me from my alma mater. We met a few weeks ago at a local alumnae gathering. I was discussing whether I wanted to continue writing or go in a new direction, maybe back to school for a Ph.D in Positive Psychology, or an MSW, to become a therapist. And she invited me out for a coffee to talk about changing tracks, which she had done. She completed her Ph.D about four years ago.

Her take on the Ph.D: don't do it unless you really need it.

Do I really need it? No.

Of course, eventually, I asked her how she defines success. “To be happy where you are in your life,” she said. After a second, she added, “But I don’t think many people define it that way.” She told me one of her classmates wouldn’t contribute to class notes for the alumnae magazine until she worked for the State Department, because she didn’t feel like her life had been worthy of note. When she got that State Department job, however, she began contributing. She wrote things like,“My husband and I travelled to Far Off Place with the State Department. Our daughter is in private school in New England.” While these things were technically true, they finessed a couple of important details. Such as, that this woman was a secretary at the State Department, not Under-Secretary of State. Such as, that the daughter did attend private school in New England, but it wasn’t a fancy prep school, it was a school for disturbed students. Minor details adjusted to make her life sound golden.

We mused on why our education did this to us – created this need to come across as successful in a particular way. We came to no conclusions. However, I did recently listen to a Philosophy Bites podcast about Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s social philosophy. Apparently Rousseau, writing back in the mid 1700s, believed that to feel good about one’s self, one needed to have self-love (self-esteem) and the approval and admiration of others. Amour de soi and amour propre, to use Rousseau’s terminology. It’s French, after all, and you know how I’m into French Chic. So here’s an example of success chic, dating all the way back to before the Revolution. An eternal and classic definition of the underpinnings of success. The lingerie of success, one might even say. Amour de soi and amour propre. The French chic definition of success. Times and fashions may change, but this is eternal, apparently. Just like French style.